Is Women's Literature...bad?
Trashy romances. Sizzling beach reads. Chick lit. Fluff. As a culture, why do we describe women’s literature in the words that we do? In this episode, Chris Hedlin, assistant director and assistant teaching professor in the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society at Notre Dame, talks with Ashley Reed, Associate Professor English at Virginia Tech and author of the book Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-century America, about the fascinating history of women’s literature in the United States and how that history continues to shape the ways people read and talk about women’s fiction today.
Experience the Episode
Friday, January 24, 2025 12:00 pm
Trashy romances. Sizzling beach reads. Chick lit. Fluff. As a culture, why do we describe women’s literature in the words that we do? In this episode, Chris Hedlin, assistant director and assistant teaching professor in the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society at Notre Dame, talks with Dr. Ashley Reed, Associate Professor English at Virginia Tech and author of the book Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-century America, about the fascinating history of women’s literature in the United States and how that history continues to shape the ways people read and talk about women’s fiction today.
Women’s Work is sponsored on ThinkND by the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society at the University of Notre Dame and Notre Dame Women Connect.
Meet the Faculty: Chris Hedlin
Chris Hedlin is assistant director and assistant teaching professor in the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society. The program, housed in the College of Arts and Letters, brings together students of business and the liberal arts to explore big questions about work – questions like “What makes work meaningful?” and “What makes an economy just?” Her role is to design courses and programs where, drawing upon humanities methods like close reading and dialogue, students can discern not only what they want to do with their lives but why.
Chris earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and, before coming to Notre Dame, taught and researched at Valparaiso University in Indiana and Azusa Pacific University in California. She is deeply invested in the public humanities and also worked for a time as a journalist at a local media nonprofit in Pittsburgh. She specializes in studying literature as it shapes people’s everyday lives and worldviews, both in history and at present.
Meet the Speaker: Ashley Reed
Ashley Reed is an associate professor in the Department of English at Virginia Tech who studies U.S. literature and religion of the nineteenth century. Her monograph, Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America, reveals how women writers from the 1820s through the 1860s transformed the nineteenth-century public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and action. She has published articles in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.
Dr. Reed received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014 and held an Andrew W. Mellow Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities in 2014-15. She is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Religion and Culture.
Women's Work: The Course Syllabus
Would you like to follow along with the readings and assignments the students of the Women’s Work course are doing? Simply download the course syllabus below.
Recommended Reading from Ashley Reed
Want to read some nineteenth-century novels but don’t know where to start? Perhaps the best strategy, Prof. Reed explains, is to start with the kinds of novels you like today. Here she provides a list of recommendations.
- Adventure: Hope Leslie by Catharine Maria Sedgwick
- Memoir: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and Recollections of an Indian Childhood by Zitkala Sa
- Poetry: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
- Short stories: Mrs Spring Fragrance and Other Stories by Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far)
- Modernism (like Virginia Woolf): The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard
- Romance: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- Fantasy: Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins
Read along with Women's Work and Notre Dame Women Connect's Spring 2025 Shared Read
The students of the Women’s Work 2025 spring semester course and members of Notre Dame Women Connect’s Spring 2025 Shared Read will both be reading and discussing Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. For more information on how to participate, please visit Notre Dame Women Connect’s website.
